OT - Francis Crick, Father of molecular biology

I like CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) radio. I listen to it when
I'm working in an empty suite. Today, they had an interview with
Cristof Koch, who was a close personal friend of Crick. Crick, the
famous molecular biologist who, along with James Watson, discovered the
double helical structure of the "genetic molecule" or DNA.
Not only was Crick knighted for his discovery of the structure of DNA,
he also won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery. At the
time, he was working at Churchill College in London, which was named
after Sir Winston Churchill. Apparantly, the Anglican Church considered
the discovery of the structure of DNA to have been a discovery of such
importance that they thought it appropriate to build a church at
Churchill College to recognize that this was the place where the key to
life had been discovered. They wanted to get Crick onboard since he was
the central player in the whole discovery, but Crick had been a life
long agnostic/athiest.
Westminister Abbey sent Crick a letter promoting the idea of building a
church at Churchill College and wanting him to endorse the building of
that church, but Crick would have none of it. He wrote back saying it
was preposterous to build a building dedicated to superstition in a
place dedicated to learning and understanding.
So, Westminister Abbey decided to get Winston Churchill involved in
recruiting Crick. Churchill sent Crick a letter saying that the new
church, if built, would be:
a) built strictly with private donations, no government tax money would
go into building of the church,
b) open to all faiths and religions. Anyone of any religion would be
welcome in the church, and
c) no faculty or students would be required to attend the church.
Crick replied to Churchill's letter suggesting that it would be equally
appropriate to build a brothel at Churchill College, and that the
brothel should be:
a) built strictly with private money; no government tax money would go
into building of the brothel,
b) open to all faiths and religions. Men of any faith or religion would
be welcome in the brothel, and
c) no faculty or students would be required to frequent the brothel.
And, Crick sent along a personal cheque for $100 saying he wanted to be
the first to contribute to the construction of the new brothel at
Churchill College.
And, that was the end of the correspondence between Sir Francis Crick
and Sir Winston Churchill on that issue.
No church was ever built at Churchill College in London.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/11/03/rosalind-franklin-and-dna-how-wronged-was-she/
Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in
medicine or physiology in 1962 for this work, four years after Rosalind
Franklin's death of ovarian cancer, possibly induced by her work with
x-rays.
Nobels are only awarded to living scholars but a handful of researchers and
advocates in the past few decades have argued that Franklin deserves more
credit than she got for the DNA discovery. Her images of the B-form of the
molecule, which revealed DNA as made of two helices (especially the
"photograph 51" image), were shared with Wilkins, Watson and Crick without
her permission. The data provided key information that allowed Watson and
Crick (who worked at Cavendish Laboratory in England) to correctly model DNA
as a double helix, a project they had been pursuing aggressively for months
in competition with Linus Pauling at Caltech and with John Randall, who
headed up the King's laboratory where Wilkins worked with Franklin.
SH

Rosalind Franklin was THE top X-ray crystallographer but she didn't understand what her results would portend. Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel, stole Rosalind Franklin's work out of her lab and shared it with the other two.
Franklin never knew, and encouraged what she thought were her colleagues until her too-early death. A Nobel can't be awarded to a dead person, but the truth about Franklin has been extensively written and published.
If you want to read something truly disgusting, look up Watson's snide, sexist comments about Franklin in "The Double Helix". Too bad there isn't an afterlife where people like that can get their due...
HB

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